Hands off our opera – it’s not your aria of expertise

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Opera directors are fed up with outsiders poaching their jobs, reports Lucy Powell

Judging by a spate of recent appointments by major opera houses, you’d be forgiven for concluding that the best qualification for directing an opera is having no qualification at all. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” Woody Allen gamely told reporters, having accepted an invitation to direct Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi at the LA Opera next year. But, he added winningly, he’s never let incompetence stop him before.

And David Cronenberg said of the operatic version of his 1986 gothic horror flick The Fly that opens at the Paris Op?ra in 2008: “As a director I can only mess it